This week I’m heading to Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K. for Connecting Light, 400 giant illuminated balloons that will cross England coast to coast along Hadrian’s Wall, a 2000-year-old Roman barrier. This will be my first exposure to 73-mile-long art! The interactive installation was networked with help from me and Digi using Programmable XBees and the venerable iDigi Device Cloud. Connecting Light was conceived and built by my friends at the YesYesNo collective, including artists Zach Lieberman and Molmol Kuo. You can see it in person in the U.K., or watch it online the evenings of August 31 and September 1st.

I really want to go see this, wonder who I can convince to go for the drive up the road for it

Moses

There was an Italian MA student called Christian (I think) at Manchester Met Uni’s MA Design Lab, designing doing something similar about 5 years ago for the Morcome Bay redevelopment. He’s not involved is he (got a feeling he was a furniture designer by trade)? This the idea was a hanging canopy of lights with accelerometers that varied the intensity of the light as the intensity of the wind changed incoming off the coast. Like a persistence of vision thing. Sounded quite cool, not sure if it got off the ground in the end?